


Double Sided Tape

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Casual Sex, Character Study, F/M, Getting Together, Light Angst, Past Relationship(s), Summer Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-25 15:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14979848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: "Zabini," she greets him, and he's unable to reign in his answering smirk. He knew she would want the first word, and the last word, and probably most of the ones in between, too. "You're back."





	Double Sided Tape

 

* * *

 

Ginny Weasley doesn't look exactly the same as he remembers her, but it's close.

Blaise takes one last long drag of his cigarette, flicking it to the ground, crushing it under the heel of his sandal, the red-orange sparks neon-bright against the summer-hot shimmer of the asphalt. He isn't stalling. He isn't hesitating. He's fishing his car keys out of his pocket, calmly pressing the LOCK button, and sauntering towards the otherwise empty food court, all without blinking.

Without thinking.

A few seconds go by. His sunglasses slip down the bridge of his nose, and he uses two fingers to push them back up. The relaxed linen collar of his shirt brushes against the underside of his jaw, which probably says something unflattering about the state of his posture, while the artfully distressed designer holes in his jeans tickle his kneecaps. 

Ginny glances over, idly tucking a loose strand of copper-red hair behind her ear, the scraped-up industrial metal of her name tag catching the glare of the sun, winking at him, practically—and the tiny silver stud in her nose is still there, dull enough to almost blend in with her freckles, and she's moved on from the heavy eyeliner, the smoky, glittering grays and the too-thick blue-black mascara that was never quite as water-proof as she thought it was. Her bangs are grown out. Her cheekbones are sharper. Her nails are painted blue.

She notices him, but doesn't outwardly react.

It grates, a little.

He'd expected her to be angry with him, indignant, irked or annoyed or maybe just  _bothered_  by his sudden reappearance—but he hadn't expected this. Disinterest. Apathy. She doesn't stand up as he approaches the spindly little cast-iron table she's sitting at, doesn't move her feet off the only other available chair, an implicit invitation for him to join her; no, she just  _studies_ him, gaze flat and cool and assessing and deliberately, unfamiliarly distant.

"Zabini," she greets him, and he's unable to reign in his answering smirk. He knew she would want the first word, and the last word, and probably most of the ones in between, too. "You're back."

He slides his sunglasses off, folding them neatly into the front of his shirt. He'd spent far too long earlier trying to decide if he wanted to leave two or three buttons undone—three seemed desperate, two seemed inadequate—but he'd ultimately gone with two. She hadn't waited for him, and he wasn't about to give her any ammunition to believe that  _he'd_ waited for  _her_. He hadn't, mostly. 

Not on purpose.

"Yeah, I got back last week," he says. "You changed your number."

She snorts. "No, I didn't."

"Yes, you did."

"No, I didn't," she says again, as if he hadn't spoken, reaching out for a half-full bottle of pale pink lemonade. "But I did block yours."

"Excuse me?"

"Yeah, it was—back in March? April? Somewhere around then."

His nostrils flare, something soft and reflexive and deceptively well-hidden twisting in his chest when he thinks about that timeline. March. April. Spring break. "Oh," he says without inflection. "Right. Well. Sorry about that."

"About what?" she asks blandly, and that polite, customer-service branded detachment is beginning to sting—properly, maliciously, less startling than it is aggravating.

"I know I told you I'd be back, but something came up."

She sips at her lemonade, lips puckered around the ridged plastic mouth of the bottle, and he has a brief, entirely fucking unwelcome flashback to last summer, to the summer before that, to the freckled pink sunburn peeling on her shoulders and the crystals of sea salt tangled up in her hair and that god-awful tasting off-brand Chapstick she was always using, the one that he'd never quite gotten around to banishing from the cup holder in his car.

"Something came up," she repeats, cocking her head to the side. There's a gleam in her eyes now, a simmering undercurrent of irritation. Frustration.

"I was on an island," Blaise says, as haughtily as he can manage. "In the Mediterranean. My mom's new boyfriend—he has a villa. Anyway, a storm hit. There weren't any boats."

Ginny's expression twitches at that—a slight wrinkle in her nose, a slight downward turn of her lips—but the she's humming, noncommittal, and replacing the cap on her lemonade, checking the time on her phone and swinging her feet off her chair. She's wearing shorts, cut-offs, slung low and tight around her hips, her thighs, and a baggy, candy-red polo that must be part of her uniform, only partially tucked in, shapeless around her torso, clashing horribly with her hair.

"Well, that sounds  _very_ exciting," she drawls, and there it is, he thinks with no small measure of satisfaction,  _there it fucking is_. Emotion. Biting, and scathing, and tremendous, and real. "Too bad you weren't just permanently stranded there, right?"

He raises an eyebrow, rocking back on his heels, and gives her a slow, slyly contemplative once-over. "You look good. By the way."

She stares at him, nonplussed, for one second, two seconds,  _three_ seconds, a glimmer of disbelief—of disappointment, maybe—flashing across her face. But then she's schooling her features, the corners of her mouth tilting up in a placid sort of almost-smile, sliding her lemonade under her arm and her phone into her back pocket. She has a tattoo, he realizes, gaze swiveling to the inside of her left wrist. A plain black number "7", hash-marked and oddly, uncharacteristically severe.

He clears his throat, unsettled, because  _that's_ new.

That's different.

"I get off at ten," Ginny says casually, conversationally, dismissively, the soles of her Chucks squeaking on smoothly polished concrete as she turns towards the movie theater. "You can pick me up."

Blaise watches her walk away, cataloguing long legs and narrow hips, one flimsy white ankle sock pulled the tiniest bit higher than the other, and feels that same painful, pulsing  _twist_ in his chest, harder, grittier, less forgiving than before.

A stalemate.

A wash.

That's the fucking same, at least.

 

* * *

 

Ginny falls back into his life—fits back into his life—like she was never even gone in the first place.

There's a disposable pink razor sitting on the edge of his marble bathtub and the cloyingly cheap vanilla scent of her drugstore conditioner bleeding into his Egyptian cotton sheets and her laughter, bright and loud and obnoxiously sincere, ringing in his ears, echoing like a thunderclap in the poisonously pervasive silence of his mother's beach house. Ginny sleeps later than he does, scowls mutinously if he tries to wake her up without the promise of waves or sex or breakfast burritos, and fills his DVR with episodes of  _MasterChef_ and  _Westworld_ and  _SportsCenter_ , alternating between them with dizzying speed. 

Blaise lets her.

He lets her shower his custom leather car seats with wet sand and flakes of dry seaweed, lets her scatter clothes and flip-flops and mismatched bikini pieces all around his bedroom, lets her put pineapple on his pizza and change his satellite radio presets to Top 40 bullshit and straddled his lap when he's lounging by the pool, lets her toss his tablet aside and kiss his jaw and scrape her teeth over the pounding, too-fast pulse at the base of his throat, slip her sunscreen-slick hands into his board shorts, lets her tease him and distract him and fucking  _ruin_ him, basically.

He lets her deflect.

He asks her what her plans are now that she's graduated, and she doesn't respond.

He asks her if she's going away to school, if she's taking a year off, if she's still training for soccer or taking surfing more seriously, and she doesn't respond.

Their relationship is confined to places that are invisible to the rest of the world. There's his mother's sprawling, divorce settlement mansion, with its privacy hedges and its motion-sensor security cameras and its gated red-brick steps that lead down to a pristine, definitively empty stretch of beach; and there's his Range Rover, with its ostentatiously blacked-out windows and its wildly spacious backseat and its British-accented GPS that can find them access roads and scenic routes, back alleys and dead ends, shadows and detours and cleverly camouflaged hiding spots; and there's the anonymity of a weekend spent beer-tasting in the desert, the illicit thrill of picking Ginny up two blocks from her parents' house while the pockmarked Neighborhood Watch signs glint red and white and silver in the moonlight, and there's third stepdad's yacht and the abandoned marine wildlife preserve by the harbor and the hole-in-the-wall taco shop with the  _perfect_ fucking guacamole that doesn't card but only serves Corona and Dos Equis and—

He lets her push him away if he gets too close.

He lets her pretend that isn't what she's doing.

It's fair, probably.

An equitable division of emotional intolerance.

 

* * *

 

"Oh, my  _god_ ," Ginny says, dropping into his passenger seat, wrenching her hideous red polo off, and flinging it somewhere behind her. She has a tank top on, sheer and clingy and white, showcasing the dark purple outline of her bra; her underwear rarely matches, is always comprised of random configurations of cotton and satin and lace and nothing at all. "I hate Thursday nights."

"So you've mentioned," Blaise says wryly, flicking his blinker off as he rolls to a stop at a red light. "You hungry?"

"Maybe." She's frowning down at her phone, at what looks like a text thread of mostly incoming messages. "What were you thinking?"

"Whatever you want is fine."

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see her lips tighten, infinitesimally, as she switches her phone off. "You always do that now."

"Do what?"

" _Whatever you want is fine_ ," she mimics, meanly.

The light turns green and he lifts his foot off the brake, glancing both ways before jerking his steering wheel to the side. "Should I not care about what you want, then?"

She heaves an impatient sigh and tucks her hair behind her ears. "No, but it's fucking weird. It's not—you never used to do that. Before."

"Do what?" he asks again, voice carefully blank.

"Care about what I want."

She says it bluntly, perfunctorily, and he doubts she means for it to  _hurt_ , but—

It does.

It  _fucking_ does.

He doesn't reply, just clenches and unclenches his jaw, attention split between the traffic on the road and the needling, stabbing ache in his chest because Jesus fucking Christ he  _knows_ he's an asshole, knows he was never as nice or as honest or as committed or as  _good_ to her as he could've been, as he should've been, but it wasn't like she ever acted like she expected more from him. Like she  _wanted_ more from him.

He wonders, though, if they both weren't a little wrong.

If they both hadn't made assumptions that were rooted more in their own bullshit than in each other's.

"We should talk," Blaise finally says, inching towards the lane that will take them to the public beach rather than his mother's house. "Obviously."

Ginny goes quiet for a while, pensive, but then he hears her take a breath, hears her grit her teeth and lick her lips and drum her fingers against the strap of her seatbelt, noticeably out of sync with the rumbling purr of the engine and the bass-heavy thrum of whatever garbage summer anthem is playing on the radio—like she's nervous. 

Like she's  _upset_.

And the relief he feels—because it's proof that she's invested, even temporarily, in the outcome of this conversation, invested in  _him_ —it's unreasonable. Ridiculous. Reckless.

"Yeah, Blaise," she says, sounding tired. "We should talk."

 

* * *

 

It's late when he pulls into the empty metered lot.

The air is smoky-sweet with the scent of supermarket firewood, charred sugar and burnt hot dogs and terrible, coconut-infused rum that reminds him—inevitably, and with far too much clarity—of high school, of a backyard luau-themed graduation party he hadn't intended to stay at for more than ten minutes, cheerleaders in tacky grass skirts and a dingy suburban pool filled with inflatable toys and a blinding smile, an infectious laugh, a too-competitive game of Truth or Dare and the blurry streak of a copper-red ponytail and a staggering, sloppy, off-center kiss in a darkened hallway, rattling picture frames and dated pinstripe wallpaper and hands on his shoulders, his hips, the crinkle of a condom wrapper and a then a gasp—breathless, high-pitched,  _trembling_ against his skin.

"Come on," Ginny says now, popping a French fry into her mouth, tossing him the greasy McDonald's bag, and scrambling up the rickety ladder affixed to the front of the lifeguard tower. "My brother worked here a couple of years ago, he told me they never keep it locked at night."

Blaise follows her cautiously, squinting out at the glassy white-capped panorama of low tide. The plywood floor of the tower creaks ominously as he sits down, stretches his legs out, shifts his weight around. 

"You know him, actually," Ginny goes on. "My brother."

"I mean—yeah. I know...a few of your brothers. What does that matter?"

She reaches for another fry, salt glistening on her fingertips. "That first summer—I didn't like you."

"That's not a secret."

"It wasn't supposed to be," she retorts. Easily. Evenly. "But I was just—I knew who you were, and I didn't  _like_ who you were, but my brothers—my family—they can be...a lot. Like, there are  _literally_ a lot of them, and I'm the youngest and the only girl and they always treat me like I'm—like they can't trust me to make my own choices."

Blaise furrows his brow, leaning back on his elbows, inspecting the fraying, see-sawing pattern of the cobwebs on the ceiling. "That sounds really fucking annoying, honestly."

Ginny snorts out a giggle, methodically chewing another fry. "Yeah. Well. They were always—they all had  _opinions_ about who I dated, and I just...with you...I wanted to be with someone who they'd hate, but it couldn't just be about that, right, like—like, it had to be someone I  _wanted_ , too, even if I didn't...even if I wasn't ready to admit it."

Blaise goes still. "Me."

"Yeah. You." She bites down on the inside of her cheek. "I didn't  _like_ you, but I wanted—"

"I think I know what you wanted," he interrupts, fumbling for his soda, taking a long, ice-cold sip and almost immediately wincing. "Sorry. Brain freeze."

"That's the second time you've apologized to me this summer. Or, like,  _ever_ , I guess."

Blaise firmly ignores the implications of that. "I didn't like you very much, either, to be fair."

Ginny shakes her head. "It doesn't matter. We stopped...whatever, when school started back up."

"Right."

"And you were a senior, and I had—it was an important year for me, for my future, so I didn't mind ignoring you." She pauses. Forces more words out. "I didn't mind  _being_ ignored by you."

"I wasn't, though," he blurts out.

"What?"

"I've never been able to ignore you," he says truthfully, chest pinching around a spiraling swell of—fuck, of self-deprecation, self- _flagellation_ , because this is, he's pretty sure, the beginning of at least one kind of end. "I knew exactly what you were doing that year."

Ginny flounders for a moment, seemingly dumbfounded, her jaw working and her eyes wide. But then she coughs and shoves three fries into her mouth at once. Chews. Swallows. "That's...surprising."

"It is what it is."

"Okay, but—last summer. What was that to you, then? Because I thought it was the same. As the first one. I thought it was..." She trails off, and there's a fragility to her demeanor, a brittle, breakable layer of intensity that Blaise instinctively associates with the face she makes when she's about to lose at something. "I thought it was you being lazy, and me being easy, but if that wasn't—"

"It wasn't."

She snatches up a fry, viciously tearing it into pieces. "I don't get it. I don't get you."

"I liked having you around," he says, running the pad of his thumb through the condensation beading along the side of his soda. "I liked waking up next to you. I liked the  _idea_ of talking to you about—about what we'd do together in a week, or in two weeks, or—"

He cuts himself off.

He counts, inwardly, to three, and then to five, and then to seven.

His mother promises forever to people constantly. Indiscriminately. Blaise has been a groomsman just as often as he's been an afterthought. And it infuriates him—pains him, bewilders him, embarrasses him—that he's wasted two whole years misunderstanding what this lurching, swooping  _pressure_ in his chest is; that he couldn't recognize the signs, couldn't wrap his fucking mind around what it  _meant_ when he was staring helplessly at his gap year itinerary and wishing there was a second name on all the reservations.

"I felt like I had something important to look forward to with you," Blaise says, slow and measured, "and I didn't react well."

Ginny drops her fry and kicks the bag away, turning towards him, scooting closer. "I was so fucking mad at you," she whispers.

"Yeah. That wasn't a secret, either."

Her lips flutter like she's suppressing a smile. "I didn't...it took me a  _really long time_ to figure out that you don't get mad like that at people you don't care about."

Blaise watches as Ginny tilts her head back and to the side, meeting his eyes, arching a brow, utterly, incomprehensibly fearless—and it isn't a challenge or a dare or an argument waiting to happen; no, it's a confirmation. She tucks herself into his lap, under his chin, lets him smooth her hair back and drag his fingers up her bare shoulder, goosebumps erupting, flush spreading, and she reeks of popcorn and fake butter and his overpriced Dead Sea salt body scrub and, underneath all that, very, very faintly, the peppermint air freshener he always sprays his car with after he smokes a cigarette.

He doesn't have an expressive face.

He's often wondered—to himself, privately, never out loud—what she even sees when she looks at him, but especially right now, right here, when he feels exposed and stripped raw and  _vulnerable_ , maybe.

"Are you leaving again?" she asks, still holding his gaze. "After the summer?"

"I don't know."

"No?"

"I don't know what I want to do, really."

"Me neither."

"Yeah?"

She shrugs, but there's a wistfulness to the motion that makes him want to know what she's thinking. Dreaming. "It's just, like—I can do whatever I want. There's nothing  _stopping_ me, you know?"

Blaise nods slowly, at first, and then more quickly, more confidently, leaning down and curling his hand around the nape of her neck, drawing her in—and their lips brush, graze, stick and catch and linger, and it's  _freeing_ and it's simple and it's like getting stuck on an island in the middle of a fucking thunderstorm because he was  _curious_ , not self-destructive, and it isn't an accident.

It isn't something he's taking, isn't something he's passively just  _allowing_ to happen; it's something he's asking for.

A chance.

A risk.

"Yeah, Ginny," he says quietly, "I know."

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
